That’s Entertainment? How teachers represent their work with Creative Partnership artists Nick Owen, University of Nottingham, Creative School Change Project.

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Presentation on theme: "That’s Entertainment? How teachers represent their work with Creative Partnership artists Nick Owen, University of Nottingham, Creative School Change Project."— Presentation transcript:

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That’s Entertainment? How teachers represent their work with Creative Partnership artists Nick Owen, University of Nottingham, Creative School Change Project

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Redesigning the teacher: an über-teacher in the making? Its just one of the sad mistakes that sort of surrounds the arts - that it’s just entertainment… (Teacher, B Primary School)

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Creative Partnerships: the policy terrain Creative School Change Project aims to explore how schools have understood and mobilized Creative Partnerships (CP) to construct school change of various kinds takes account of the relationship between schools, CP regions and national CP policy looks at the processes through which CP has become embedded, in a range of schools.

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Redesigning, reskilling or deskilling? Playing out policy in the classroom teaching essentially has become a process of judgement rather than: the wider sphere of morally purposeful activity, of which teaching is a part, which we call education – teachers become technicians who implement the educational ideas and procedures of others rather than professionals who think about these matters for themselves. (Alexander, 2004: 11)

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Our goal is to improve the quality of teaching and learning throughout the system. We will do this by building capacity and providing flexibility at the front line, backed by an intelligent accountability framework and by targeted intervention to deal with underperformance. (Hannon, 2004) Redesigning, reskilling or deskilling? Playing out policy in the classroom

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Profound and sustainable educational change and innovation require that we move beyond a search for a ‘correct’ and accurate meaning and practice of pedagogy from a less causal and linear model of educational effects to an ecological model that explores the complex embeddings and mediations of teaching and learning within cultures and discourses, systems and everyday practices. (Luke, 2006: 3) Redesigning, reskilling or deskilling? Playing out policy in the classroom

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The artists are coming! Expectations, desires, hopes and wishes Angeline, who is our catalyst…. came in and engaged with the children in the school… the first time she came in to assembly, and actually taught the whole school, children and adults, a song in a way that almost took people’s breath away… it also needs to be said that during the time that Angeline has been in the school (it) has been through some difficult times, in that we have a dispute with the National Union of Teachers going, a quite serious dispute including strike action, pickets on the gate… I think Angeline, in a way was viewed by some people with suspicion. (M Head teacher).

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First contact, first relationships: from community to society I was very much into the arts and when CP was first introduced to schools in Sunderland, it was introduced by the arts advisors and schools that were involved in the arts in a big way were invited to apply, and I applied, largely because I thought here’s £20,000 for the arts in my school. Head teacher, B Primary School

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“…you know you’re self-employed and you work in your way, you do your own thing, you wear what you like, you look what you like, you think what you like and you behave how you like and that’s sort of not how schools work." Head teacher, M Nursery School The medieval mercenary warrior (i.e. free+lance)

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autonomy and self-expression are highly prized, (and) many practitioners prefer to remain outside of the employee job market and pursue freelance or self-employment. (Burns Owens Partnership, 2006: 8) I tend to use people who work in the industry. I charge a lot for what I do. I mean CP rates are CP rates but all my guys are more commandoes: they work in the industry as well as teach as well as have the street respect and the ability to speak at street level to the kids. So that’s why I charge a lot. I only work with very few people because I find it hard to find commandoes in this field. (K, artist at SJ R.C.H.S.)

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An Army of Embeddables CP has also provided us with lots of materials and an army of embeddables and they’ve been coming into the school with project lighting teams and, at key points during the start of the projects we’ve had huge amounts of input from schools creatives. This week, for example, there were probably up to a dozen people in here working in the ECC area: some of them were trying to resource us; doing some joined up planning for teachers and making sure we were getting our hands dirty doing some of the projects that we run. (teacher, NHC Comprehensive)

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The artist warrior comes home: the hankering after relationships of Gemeinschaft She is just outstanding. We just have a fantastic relationship. It was like, I guess, some of these people that pair folk up you know, relationship agencies and so on. Because it was just a marriage meant to be. Head, C Primary School

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Emerging relationships, hybridising identities The gag may be waving the flag That began with a mystical hand Hip hooray, the American way The world is a stage The stage is a world of entertain...ment... (That’s Entertainment, Howard Deitz / Arthur Schwartz)

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Men in tights: a case of mistaken identity I came into the school, I’ve been involved with CP as a creative advisor right from its inception, so with one hat on I’ve been about trying to develop creative practices in schools as an advisor…..so that’s with one hat… I’ve worked as a creative artist, creative practitioner, dance artist, call it what you will… I’m now a sponsored Governor by creative partnerships… I’m the governor who became the chair of governors… I became the first national sponsored governor for the arts council and creative partnerships working in a school…. So in a way my relationship with this school is actually quite unique. (J, dancer, governor, special one, R Primary School).

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The Mourinho Effect: the special one We have to find a way of being able to continue working with J…. the work that we do with J is very important and he is part of the fabric of this school and the governors and I are making financial provision to continue working with Jeremy when the funding runs out from other sources. (Head, D School)

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Reskilling or deskilling: or relearning and reconceiving? they experienced some of the language of a different culture, but they didn’t go into the art or the creativity, it was: this is what you are going go do, it wasn’t creative and I feel that, I know I am a creative person by the type of mess that’s in here, it doesn’t bother me all this mess, because I know that underlying it is a very strong system and I’ve got things filed in different colours and in different places and the organisation and planning is there… I felt that as a creative person myself that the creativity wasn’t coming out there – it was too structured. (teacher, H Primary School)

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Finding a happy medium: the soil science of growing effective artist teacher relationships Before that we decided to make a little garden area, so that was our first project… we didn’t know what we were doing – we had our expert, practitioner, in and we didn’t always understand each other, again we wanted to involve too many children at the initial onset, we thought we’ll use two classes to create this garden and you can’t really manage 60 children with one adult and one practitioner and the rota system wasn’t ideal so we learnt about the numbers, practicalities….… also soil is so heavy. Head, SM Primary

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… the other thing that really riled was she said the girls you all have to cook and clean the house – boys you go off and do the hunting – and I just thought NO – that might be the way you are used to in the way you were brought up in Africa but that is NOT what I want to do for positive role models in this class, where I have got three quarters boys and one quarter girls. I want the girls to have positive role models, not that they are the little girls that stay at home. (Rachel, teacher, H Primary School) The first signs of Spring…

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If I’m going to be absolutely honest I said to Creative Partnerships that we know what we want and we know where we can go and get it so can we just get on with it? I think that if we hadn’t had the ideas I would probably have turned to them a bit more but we have, ourselves, had a clear idea of what we wanted. CP Coordinator – L Primary School. The first signs of Spring…

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From object to subject; from adoration to agency because they know the size of our classroom and they’ve seen the problems we have in getting all of our staff to sit down together so they were saying that actually the school just doesn’t belong to the children. Now that’s quite a strange thing for us to comprehend because most of the teachers actually feel that the school is for the purposes of the children and we forget that actually it’s our workspace and we need to have places in this which are just for us. CP Co-ordinator, D Primary

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the document that muf produced went to the Think Tank and the Think Tank actually were in charge of making the decision about what we were going to concentrate on in schools so they had the document; read it and then, as a group, we decided to focus on the space issue and that led to things like the yellow ribbons; the proposals for the new entrance and to further work on the playgrounds…. I think it was probably the very first time that they’d been actually asked their opinions about things. CP Co-ordinator, D Primary Spring awakening…

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The unexpected ecological outcomes from reskilling, deskilling, designing… the flowering of pockets of critical resistance which can lighten the heavy soil of curriculum, timetable and school improvement agendas.